REI Leads vs. Pay-Per-Click
PPC charges you for clicks. We charge you for validated motivated sellers. Here is the math your ad dashboard will never show you.
With PPC you pay for clicks, not contacts - and pay-per-click vendors never refund the bots, MLS-listed homes, wholesalers, and agents hiding inside your "conversions." Add management fees and unrefunded junk, and a $300 dashboard cost per conversion is often a true cost of $800+ per valid motivated seller. REI Leads flips the model: pay per valid lead, 100% exclusive, with bad leads filtered out or credited.
The Quick Comparison
PPC can produce great deals, in fact REI Leads is one of the largest PPC advertisers in real estate and it's a primary source of our motivated seller leads. The difference for investors is who carries the risk between your budget and a seller you can actually talk to. PPC management is expensive, and without active management your campaigns can quickly start wasting money on irrelevant keywords - causing low-motivation "conversions". With smaller budgets, the cost of managment can be a large percentage of your ad spend.
PPC makes sense when...
- -You have an in-house marketing team and want full control of creative, landing pages, and funnel
- -You can absorb months of testing and learning-phase spend before the numbers stabilize
- -You have a very large budget, and the cost of management is under 10% of your total ad spend
- -You track true cost per deal and understand metrics like ROAS - not the unrealistic cost-per-conversion in the PPC account
REI Leads makes sense when...
- +You want to pay only when a validated, exclusive motivated seller is delivered - never for a click
- +You want bad leads credited instead of silently eating them
- +You would rather spend your time talking to sellers than managing campaigns and agencies
You Are Paying for a Click, Not a Contact
PPC platforms bill at the very top of the funnel. The moment someone clicks your ad, you have paid for it, before you know if they are a real person, a real owner, or a real opportunity. All of these show as conversions in your dashboard, and none are refundable:
Click fraud and junk form fills are a known cost of PPC. The platform still bills the click.
Sellers already working with an agent who click your ad anyway. Not an off-market deal - still billed.
Industry players researching the market or fishing for buyers. They convert on forms too.
A property type most investors can't buy. PPC has no filter for it.
Wrong numbers, dead ends, ghosting. With PPC, an unreachable conversion costs the same as a closed deal.
REI Leads bills at the other end of the funnel. Our AI platform validates every inquiry before it ever reaches you - and if a bad one slips through our filters, it is credited. You pay for contacts, not for clicks.
The "Cost Per Conversion" in Your Dashboard Is Not Your Real Cost
Walk through a typical month: $3,000 in ad spend, a $1,500 management fee, and a dashboard showing a $300 cost per conversion. Watch what happens to that number as reality gets added back in.
$3,000 in ad spend, 10 conversions. Looks reasonable - but a conversion is just a form fill or a call, not a qualified seller.
Almost nobody includes it, but the $1,500/mo you pay an agency (or an employee) is part of every lead's cost: $4,500 total spend across the same 10 conversions.
Strip out the bots, MLS-listed homes, wholesalers, agents, and unreachables - roughly half of typical PPC conversions - and your true cost per valid, contactable motivated seller has more than doubled the dashboard number.
Run Your Own Numbers
Plug in your actual ad spend, management fee, and dashboard cost per conversion. The calculator shows your true cost per valid motivated seller - and what the same budget buys with exclusive pay-per-lead pricing.
- Dashboard "cost per conversion"
- $300
- Conversions per month
- 10
- + Management fee: real cost per conversion
- $450
- Valid motivated sellers per month
- 5.5
- Same monthly budget
- $4,500
- Management fees
- $0
- Validated motivated sellers per month
- 11.3
- Bad leads
- Credited
Estimates for comparison only. Your PPC results depend on your market, campaigns, and follow-up; REI Leads bids vary by county. See pricing for how county bidding works.
Want the full picture, from lead to closed deal? Run your whole funnel through the Know Your Numbers ROAS Calculator.
Side by Side
Pay Per Click Isn't Bad
We are not anti-PPC. In fact we are one of the largest pay-per-click advertisers in this residential investing and have spent tens of millions of dollars PPC, alongside TV, radio, direct mail, and many other channels. PPC absolutely produces motivated sellers, but it performs best at large scale where you can afford to do landing page optimizations and the managment overhead is low relative to the spend. The question is whether you want to buy the clicks and carry the filtering risk yourself, or buy the finished product: a validated, exclusive, contactable seller at a price you set per county. Many investors do both and let true cost per deal decide where the next dollar goes.
PPC vs. Pay Per Lead: Common Questions
Is PPC a bad way to generate motivated seller leads?
No - PPC works very well at scale, and REI Leads runs pay-per-click ads nationwide. The difference is who carries the risk. When you run PPC directly, you pay for every click and every junk conversion, and you absorb the management overhead. With pay per lead, the marketing risk stays with us: you only pay for a validated motivated seller, and bad leads are credited.
What does 'cost per conversion' actually measure in PPC?
A conversion is a tracked action - usually a form fill or a call - not a qualified seller. Your dashboard's cost per conversion counts bots, fake submissions, MLS-listed homeowners, wholesalers, agents, and people you can never reach as successes. None of those are deals you can do, but all of them are conversions you paid for.
Why is my real cost per lead higher than my dashboard shows?
Three reasons. First, the dashboard divides ad spend by all conversions, including invalid ones. Second, it ignores management fees which can be 10% to over 50% of ad spend. Paying an agency $1,500/mo on $3,000 of spend raises a $300 cost per conversion to $450 in reality. Third, there are no refunds: once you remove the conversions that were never valid sellers, the true cost per contactable motivated seller often lands near double the all-in number.
Does Google or Bing/Yahoo refund bad clicks or bad leads?
Outside of narrow, hard-to-prove invalid-click cases, no. If the click came from a bot, a competitor, an agent, or a homeowner already listed on the MLS, you paid for it. Ad platforms sell traffic, not outcomes - the quality risk is entirely yours.
Can I run PPC and REI Leads at the same time?
Yes, and many of our investors do. Exclusive pay-per-lead gives you a predictable baseline of validated sellers at a known cost per lead, while your own marketing runs alongside it. Comparing true cost per deal across both channels each month tells you where the next dollar should go.
Stop Paying for Clicks. Start Paying for Sellers.
Book a strategy call and we'll price your counties, walk through your numbers, and see if exclusive pay-per-lead beats your current cost per deal.
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